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THIS careful biographical monograph gives Pennsylvania’s Quaker ‘king’ of the middle 18th century the attention which has long been his due. Here is Israel Pemberton (1715-1779) as merchant, politician, friend of the Indians, Quaker leader, philanthropist, and proponent of peace. This Israel Pemberton, son of Israel, the merchant, and grandson of Phineas, one of the colony’s Quaker founders, was born to lead. Energetic, conscientious, gifted, and shrewd, he typified the practical, political side of Quakerism in all its strength and weakness. Economic success as merchant-shipper-trader came early to Pemberton, but did not satisfy him for long, and from about 1750 to the Revolution he devoted most of his energy to trying to maintain Quaker principles in Pennsylvania. He led the Friends in and out of the Assembly in their opposition to the aggressive Indian policy of the proprietors and the frontiersmen, hoping to keep peace with the Indians and to preserve the liberties as well as the power with which William Penn had endowed the first generation of Pennsylvania Friends. The effort failed, but Pemberton’s bold attempt, played for high stakes against all and sundry, is here told for the first time in the rich detail which the great collection of Pemberton Papers in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania makes possible.—Thomas Drake, The American Historical Review
Pacifist Prophet recounts the untold history of peaceable Native Americans in the eighteenth century, as explored through the world of Papunhank (ca. 1705–75), a Munsee and Moravian prophet, preacher, reformer, and diplomat. Papunhank’s life was dominated by a search for a peaceful homeland in Pennsylvania and the Ohio country amid the upheavals of the era between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. His efforts paralleled other Indian quests for autonomy but with a crucial twist: he was a pacifist committed to using only nonviolent means. Such an approach countered the messages of other Native prophets and ran against the tide in an early American world increasingly wrecked with violence, racial hatred, and political turmoil. Nevertheless, Papunhank was not alone. He followed and contributed to a longer and wider indigenous peace tradition. Richard W. Pointer shows how Papunhank pushed beyond the pragmatic pacifism of other Indians and developed from indigenous and Christian influences a principled pacifism that became the driving force of his life and leadership. Hundreds of Native people embraced his call to be “a great Lover of Peace” in their quests for home. Against formidable odds, Papunhank’s prophetic message spoke boldly to Euro-American and Native centers of power and kept many Indians alive during a time when their very survival was constantly threatened. Papunhank’s story sheds critical new light on the responses of some Munsees, Delawares, Mahicans, Nanticokes, and Conoys for whom the “way of war” was no way at all.
In 1758, a Quaker tailor and sometime shopkeeper and school teacher stood up in a Quaker meeting and declared that the time had come for Friends to reject the practice of slavery. That man was John Woolman, and that moment was a significant step, among many, toward the abolition of slavery in the United States. Woolman's antislavery position was only one essential piece of his comprehensive theological vision for colonial American society. Drawing on Woolman's entire body of writing, Jon R. Kershner reveals that the theological and spiritual underpinnings of Woolman's alternative vision for the British Atlantic world were nothing less than a direct, spiritual christocracy on earth, what Woolman referred to as "the Government of Christ." Kershner argues that Woolman's theology is best understood as apocalyptic-centered on a supernatural revelation of Christ's immediate presence governing all aspects of human affairs, and envisaging the impending victory of God's reign over apostasy. John Woolman and the Government of Christ explores the theological reasoning behind Woolman's critique of the burgeoning trans-Atlantic economy, slavery, and British imperial conflicts, and fundamentally reinterprets 18th-century Quakerism by demonstrating the continuing influence of early Quaker apocalypticism.